It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a pastor again. I love preaching; I love caring with, and for, people. I love sharing in the sacred moments of life when we see God in expected and unexpected ways. To do these things well, though, you have to have time, and that was the one thing I was lacking in my life. The year before, we started a nonprofit organization called the Center for Progressive Renewal. CPR is an international... Read more

Holy Tuesday. Never heard of it? Well, today you are living one. It is the Tuesday of Holy Week, of course, but does that make today holy? It is such a strange word, “holy.” We all use it, but I wonder if we really know what it means. Frankly, I took an entire semester-long course in graduate school that studied only that word in Hebrew and Greek, and I’m not sure I know what it means. I can tell you... Read more

Most people call this week Holy Week, though pastors often jokingly refer to it as “hell week.” It can be stressful to prepare and lead all those special services. It also can be terribly frustrating to spend hours and hours preparing and have only a handful of people attend. Holy Week used to be a time of intense spiritual devotion in the church, a time when people took their faith the most seriously, moving toward Good Friday, arguably the holiest... Read more

Marriage Equality is an emerging story useful to both same sex and the “one man/one woman” kind of marriage.   It is even helpful to families who are single parented.  By story I mean the tale we tell ourselves about ourselves.  The big word for it is narrative – and what the nation is missing right now is a narrator in chief about gender.  Without a commanding narrative about what it means to have a gender, we are each and all... Read more

The Blessings That We Refuse by Donna Schaper Immigrants are a blessing, not a curse. They are assets, not deficits. I have learned this the hard way after seven years working with the New York City New Sanctuary Movement. We have accompanied 67 people on the verge of detention or deportation, and we have lost only three of them. These people are restaurant owners — employers. Some run small high tech start-ups; others raise children on their own, grouping with... Read more

Yesterday I talked about restorative justice as an alternative to our current system of punitive justice in the United States. We don’t make any real effort to “restore” the villain, the victim, or the community. Our only objective seems to be revenge, and even a casual reading of the words of Jesus should tell us that this is not a worthy outcome, nor a healthy one. In the end, if revenge (punishment) is the ONLY outcome then everyone loses. The... Read more

When I was the president of Hope for Peace & Justice (www.h4pj.org) we worked hard to popularize the idea of “restorative justice.” That organization is still doing that worthy work, but having two other fulltime jobs greatly limited my involvement with H4PJ, though we are still financial contributors and activists. Working for restorative justice in Texas and the rest of the South seems a lot like trying to grow a forest in the desert. The soil was not receptive, and... Read more

Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once told about a contest he was asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child, and the winner was a four-year-old boy. His next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had lost his wife recently. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into his gentleman’s yard, climbed into his lap and just sat there. When his mother asked him what he had said to the... Read more

In a recently published book “Invisible Men: Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress,” researcher, author and professor, Dr. Becky Pettit, told us that the United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other society in recorded history. In 2008, the Pew Charitable Trusts reported that more than two million inmates were behind bars. These statistics paint a picture that should scare us all: There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty... Read more

James Moore tells a story in one of his books about being invited after a speaking engagement to have dinner with a family in their home. When they sat down at the table, the mother called on their four-year-old son, Christopher, to say the blessing. She had mentioned to Mr. Moore earlier that she was trying to teach the children how to pray—not just memorized prayers, but prayers of gratitude to God straight from the heart. As they took their... Read more